8/11/2019 Lieder Essay

1/1

The Nineteenth- Century German Lied, Lorraine Gorrell, ed., Pauly G. Reinhard, Amadeus Press,

Portland, Oregon, 1993.

Although song has been prized throughout history, it has also been considered a slight genre by even

its finest creators. Schumann thought his greatness could only be achieved by writing symphonies

and operas. Yet he, like Schubert and Wolf, wrote songs of unsurpassing beauty which, of

themselves, sealed his reputation for posterity. Song held a special delight for nineteenth-century

composers and seemed to come from the most intimate, fragile space in their creative spirit.

Schumann used the lied to meditate on his own interior world. Page 9.

The nineteenth-century German lied owes much of its origin and inspiration to German poetry. The

lyric outpourings of the great Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and other poets of his age acted as a

stimulus to song composers from Mozart in his Das Veilchen (The violet) to Wolf in his over fifty

settings of Goethe poetry. Page 15.

The lied is generally defined as a genre that melded poetry and music into a unique relationship in

which piano and voice were closely linked to the poetic phrase, and the melody, harmony and

rhythm of the music were crafted to reflect the meaning and mood of the poems they interpreted.

Every song composer of the nineteenth century was highly individual in the use and relative

emphasis of these various elements. But the uniting of two distinct arts, poetry and music, has

generated much controversy and a great variety of opinions during the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries, as poets, musicians and critics tried to determine what constituted the most successful

balance in this relationship. Page 15.

Schumann, as music critic for the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik, was highly conscious of poetrys role in

a song and praised composer Norbert Burgmller because: His foremost concern is- as it should be

with everyone-to recreate in a subtle musical realization that most delicate effects of the poem.

Seldom does any connotation escape him; nor if he has grasped it, does his interpretation of it

miscarry.Page 17.

In a review of Robert Franzs songs, Schumanncriticizes earlier songwriters because the poem

merely ran along beside *the music+*Robert Franz+ is interested in something other than music that

merely sounds good or bad; he strives to recreate for us the real essence of the poem Page 17.

A composer may choose to enhance the meaning of words with his music and even emphasize the

onomatopoetic quality of particular words. As soon as words become part of a musical composition,

the listeners thoughts can bedirected towards specific ideas. Words call forth specific images in the

mind of a listener and have definite meanings, so that when they are used in a musical composition,

the music becomes less abstract than in purely instrumental music. While instrumental music may

communicate general moods to its listeners, the words of a song can change the listeners thoughts

directly. Page 17.

Robert Schumann (1810-1856), the next major composer after Schubert to turn his creative talents

to song writing, was at first reluctant to recognise the lied as worthy of his attention. Although his

earliest, unpublished works had been songs, Schumann devoted the first ten years of his

compositional life to writing for the piano. Page 139.